Animal cell culture, particularly mammalian cell culture, is commonly used for the expression of recombinantly produced proteins for therapeutic, prophylactic and diagnostic purposes. Although mammalian cell culture methods are preferred over microbial expression systems (e.g., bacterial or yeast expression systems), because they are better suited to express high molecular weight proteins and proteins having complex steric structures, protein expression levels from mammalian cell culture-based systems are generally considerably lower than those from microbial expression systems. While numerous approaches have tried to increase protein expression from mammalian cell culture, these methods have been deficient in optimizing conditions for cell growth, maintaining high cell viability and producing large volumes of high quality protein, thereby limiting their practical application in the biopharmaceutical industry.
As such, there is a need in the art to develop improved large-scale animal cell culture methods for producing and purifying proteins (e.g., antibodies and antibody fragments, peptides, enzymes, growth factors, hormones, interleukins, interferons, and vaccines) to achieve reliable and cost-efficient protein production at high yields.